Getting to Know AI: Einstein Prediction Builder

Chris Stegall
creme de la crm
Published in
4 min readMay 27, 2020

Artificial intelligence is everywhere today. And it’s more than a digital way of transforming data into insight and action— it’s an extra set of hands and eyes, an extra brain in the brainstorm and, just like your team, it gets better at its job and improves its understanding of your business every day.

We live in a time when organizations of all sizes have an unprecedented amount of data but, for many, translating that data into value can seem like an insurmountable task. That’s where AI really shines.

In this series, Getting to Know AI, we’ll be looking at artificial intelligence and how organizations are leveraging Salesforce Einstein to assist, automate, analyse, and do, well, almost everything to get more out of their tech, data, and workforce.

These posts will run in conjunction with our new Einstein webinar series, so if you’re more of a visual learner, jump to the end to enroll in our first installment on July 16th!

Today, we’ll be taking a look at Einstein Prediction Builder.

What is Prediction Builder?

Salesforce Einstein Prediction Builder lets you enlist one of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence platforms to make better business decisions, driven by your data.

Whether it’s your business development team trying to determine which leads to prioritize on their daily outreach, the executive suite trying to accurately forecast the next twelve months of revenue, your customer care team trying to improve client retention, or an organization-specific metric that drives your core business, Einstein Prediction Builder puts you in full control of an AI to analyze, extrapolate, and then forecast effectively.

And while it includes out-of-the-box apps for the most commonly sought data-driven predictions, the best part is how simple Einstein makes creating your own queries, without writing a single line of code. All you have to do is come up with the question.

With Prediction Builder you can create predictions on any and every Salesforce Object, and answer both boolean (“yes” or “no”) and quantitative (“give me a number, or percent-likelihood”) queries. It’s also one of those rare technological investments that actually increase value over time, because automated model retraining and automated model scoring mean it’s constantly improving its effectiveness (and it removes the requirement that you be an AI-expert to get significant results).

Use Cases

Curious how companies are already employing Einstein Prediction Builder to get results? We’ll dive into these in more depth in the webinar but at a high-level, organizations are already seeing results in:

Sales:

  • Intelligent Forecasting (How much of the sales pipeline is actually going to close?)
  • Lead and Opportunity Scoring (Which leads are likely to convert and where should reps spend their time?)
  • Propensity to Buy (Which Accounts should be pitched which products?)

Service:

  • Churn Risk (Which customers are at risk of attriting?)
  • Upselling + Cross-Selling (Which customers are likely to be interested in which additional products?)
  • Next Incident (Which clients are likely to log a case soon? So you can be proactive with your outreach)
  • Onboarding Success (Who’s likely to buy in fully from the start, and which clients will need help driving adoption?)

Marketing:

  • Lifetime Value (How much will this customer spend with us over the course of our relationship?)
  • Ad-Spend Value (Which campaigns are likely to be effective, and how much revenue can we expect per ad dollar spent?)

Commerce:

  • Repeat Business Likelihood (How likely is a customer to make a follow-up purchase)
  • Return Management (How likely is this customer to return this product?)

Internal (HR, IT, Finance, etc…)

  • Offer Acceptance (How likely is a candidate to accept the job offer?)
  • Staff Growth (How well does our hiring pipeline align with out projected business growth?)
  • Payment Risk (Which Accounts are likely to default? Which are likely to be late? How late?)
  • Project Risk (How likely is our team to hit the project deadline?)
  • Equipment Loss (How likely is any given piece of equipment to fail?)

The only real limit is your ability to come up with questions that will help your business succeed, and that’s as easy as asking “What do I wish I knew 1 year ago? Or 5 years ago?”. Or as simple as: “If I knew _______, I’d feel better about this.”

Then let Einstein Prediction Builder fill in the blanks for you!

Register for the Webinar

Ready for a more in-depth look Einstein Prediction Builder and how it’s being used to drive intelligent businesses around the world?

Join us on July 16th at 10am PDT for our webinar Getting to Know AI: Einstein Prediction Builder. In it we’ll introduce more of the platform’s core functionality, walk through building a sample prediction, and take a deeper dive into actual business cases and their results. Registration is open now.

We’ll also be recording the webinar and releasing it alongside some additional reading material with expanded use cases for all who register — so feel free to sign up, even if you won’t be able to attend on the day.

REGISTER HERE

Until then, keep working hard, smart, and happy. And we’ll see you in the cloud.

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Chris Stegall
creme de la crm

Digital Marketing Director @ MK Partners. Salesforce lover, user, and constant learner.